The System

Over the last two months or so, I've run Deep Carbon Observatory for the Tuesday Night game group. What follows are my thoughts on the module, the system I ran it in, and the way it went.

The System

I ran the game in a hacked up LotFP system, mostly using the base rules, but making some alterations. Specifically, since I tend to dislike Race as Class, I added in a barebones race template, removed Elf, Dwarf, and Halfling as classes, and filled in the gaps with the homebrew classes Assassin, Survivalist, and Nuclear Druid.

Assassin is a specialist variant, which gets fewer skill points, but automatic points in Sneak Attack, as well as bonus damage to sneak attacks. Survivalist is similar to a Ranger, with bonuses to ranged attacks, and some skill points in Stealth, Bushcraft, and Architecture. Nuclear Druid is an alpha class, which I was creating for a different game, but took the opportunity to make available to my players for testing.

My hacks worked pretty well. No class was an obvious over-performer or under-performer.

The group initiative system is great, and I'm using it in every D&D-like game I run from now on. Rolling a d6 for each side has inherent drama, especially if the fight is particularly dangerous.

I also used the Anti-Hammerspace Item Trackers for inventory, which I really enjoyed. I've never been a fan of ANY encumbrance rules, because they take up time and math. Having a super-quick tracker that not only shows WHAT you have, but WHERE it's kept, was real nice. Especially considering the frequency some of it was lost.

I killed fewer characters than I was expecting. They were clever and lucky, although they got banged around a lot.

My Preparations

This game was an interim game. Our Tuesday night group plays games in a rotation, and once a game finishes, we have a pitch night. Everyone interested in running a game gives their pitch for it, and we vote on the one we want to play. This time (a first, in our group), no one was ready. So we gave the out-of-our-asses pitches. I pitched DCO, which I had recently picked up. The ACTUAL chosen game was Dark Heresy, but the chosen GM wasn't prepared, as no one had planned on running, so he asked if I'd run my module in the meantime, while he got stuff ready. I agreed.

I had never run a module before. In years of GMing, I have only run my own content. I thought that running a module would be less work. Otherwise, why would people do it?

I could not have been more wrong. Likely, the difficulty on the GM side is unique to the module, but as soon as I began diving into it, it became clear that there were a LOT of moving parts, and I would need to take some steps to make sure it all went smoothly.

Step One - Maps

I made heavy use of a double-sided wet-erase mat for the zone area maps. This was super useful.

Please ignore the fact that I cannot draw.

I printed out maps from the PDF, including some after-market top-down maps of the dungeon proper.

I used a whiteboard for quick maps of small-scale areas.

Step Two - Cards

I started off with index cards for important NPC's and monsters, especially ones with existing artwork. I printed out the artwork and taped it to the opposite side of the card for easy display to the players. Other index cards contained the rules and tactics of The Crows, as well as a day tracker, with indicators of what happens each day if there is no player interference.

I also made a knee-jerk decision the week before running, that turned out to be the best decision I've made in a while. I bought a bunch of blank playing cards, and used them as Item Cards. Any item of interest in the module, I made a card for, with a shitty picture (because I suck at drawing) and an item description, that could just be handed to the player. Any item (or follower) that came up in play, I would make a card for and hand to the player. Not only is this pretty neat, but the question of "who has the ____________" is easily answered by "Who has the card?"

Seriously, item cards are something I'm using in other games where stuff is important. Highly recommended.

Step Three - My Framework

Since this was a one-adventure game, and it's not a very forgiving system, I elected to both create a backstory that explained the PC's bond, ensured their cooperation, as well as allowed for the easy introduction of new characters when accidents happened. I chose a busy, bureaucratic wizard named Blister. Blister has a lot of things he wants to know about. He can't investigate them all personally. And the loyalty of adventurers is suspect, as is their survivability. Enter...

The Eternity BadgeYou must wear the badge.
You know who else wears them.
You should probably assist them.
The badge knows when you die.
Your next of kin will be compensated.
Maybe with a badge.
The badge must be recovered.
You should try to recover it.
If you don't, it will find a way.
This Is Not Free.

The badges also retained experience gain. So, when a player died, a new adventurer of comparable level would be thrown into the meat grinder, and without the complications of "We don't trust him!"

I also ran out to Walmart and picked up a bunch of cheap Moleskin notebooks, in order to present my players with...

The Continuous JournalYou know how to read and write now.
Write down what happens.
Pick up where the last author left off.
Return the journal upon completion.

The Journal was both a way to encourage note-taking (as DCO is complicated), but also provide an opportunity to develop your characters over the course of the game. Some players went more in-depth than others, which I expected. But overall, it was a solid system that allowed for fun characters, and the easy introduction of new ones.

I was amazed at how quickly everyone fell into the pattern of griping about Blister, an NPC who had never once been on screen, and bonding over their shared plight.

The Module

DCO needs a User Experience update. Badly. It starts out so strongly. The opening scene-setting table is FANTASTIC from any perspective. The players arrive in a drowned town, with chaos happening around them, and are presented with events happening at the same time. They must choose which they will interact with. The choices they make determine what events they can interact with next.

This table is great. I transferred it to a whiteboard and covered the lower part, asking players to place minis to indicate what they are interacting with. This whole bit does such an amazing job of setting the scene, that I bow to Mr. Stuart. Including character creation, this chunk took a whole session. It was pretty easy to run, and apparently very engaging to play.

After this, the game opens into a point crawl, with the players traveling up a drowned river valley, with many points of interest in the way, including the Three-Meter Pike, a village terrorized by a near-immortal witch swimming under the surface, and a strange golem tearing apart another village to build a terrible, terrible dam. This is where the UX issue really rears its head.

One of the problems of the module is organization. I think it would really benefit from some introductory paragraphs introducing the elements in an area in brief, and setting up the relationship between them. I found that I had to do a lot of flipping back and forth to get things straight in my head. There are some things that are additionally very hard to find at a moment's notice, or that are cryptically referenced long before they are explained.

The maps also need a clarity update, especially within the observatory proper. There is a cross-section of the dungeon, with numbered rooms and some drawn elements, but the only top-down maps are third-party, and don't include important static objects, or the all-important thing that everyone making a map should do, WRITE THE THING ON THE MAP WHERE IT IS ON THE MAP AND USE THE NUMBERS TO REFERENCE LONGER DESCRIPTIONS.

Ok. So. In DCO, getting to the dungeon is an adventure in and of itself. All of the problems that the players find here are consequences of the up-river dam bursting. They all make sense. Many people are starving. It's bleak, but also engaging, and it includes my favorite flavor text of any monster in anything I've ever read ever.

At this point, it's worth mentioning that Scrap Princess's Art is fucking awesome. It's like a scribble that's trying to crawl off the page into your brain (I think I read something like this somewhere but I can't remember where). This one is RELATIVELY unrefined, but if you like what you see, pick up Veins of the Earth. The latest Scrap-Stuart collaboration, it's my favorite book in recent memory.

Anyway.

Past the first zone, there is the broken dam, which my players bypassed with the face of a golem. IMHO, this was fine, as the dam seems to be...in the way. Like, you can cut the interior of the dam out and not really lose much of the experience.

Past the dam is the last zone before the dungeon proper. This was great fun. My players negotiated with a group of belligerent salamander-people, and then went ahead of them to allow some poor folk who had lived on the surface of the lake before the water level dropped, to escape the salamander-people's crusade. I had a blast running that bit especially. Even when the people they saved came back as zombies the next day.

Now might be a good time to mention The Crows. The Crows are a ruthless party of rival adventures that avoid direct conflict at all costs. One of them has an item that can raise the dead at the cost of XP debt. Bodies are resources to them, and this valley has a LOT of bodies. And they work, over the course of the adventure, to hinder and indirectly murder the players. They are a moving part that you, as a GM, always should keep in mind. In fact, the dwarven ranger in that enemy party scored the first kill against my PC's (although had they not been using Purify Food and Water often, that point would have come much earlier).

At the end of the last zone is the entrance to the Observatory.

The Observatory, the dungeon proper, doesn't care about you. This is one of the module's strengths. The dungeon is not there for you to explore. It is there, being what it is, as it has done for many long lost years. There is a set of scales in there that can weigh and balance strange esoteric properties of objects, with many dials and weights. It can accurately measure a creature's honesty in units of Innocence Years. In another dungeon, this would be a puzzle to open a door. Here, it is just what it is, lost to time. Interesting, potentially valuable, and not for you.

The Observatory is also home to a wonderfully creepy Giant that can squeeze itself through a mailslot.
This giant is hard to kill, strong, and wonderfully creepy. One of my favorite moments to run, was when I got to nearly kill a player, and then have the giant squeeze itself through a tiny gap of stone to escape, demonstrating that it is still here, and can come from anywhere.

To make a long story short, the players had gotten to the deepest level, discovered the observatory and its scrying abilities, gotten a pile of loot, traded gossip with the Salt Dryads, dropped a member of the enemy adventuring party on the Gravity Knife (a simple, effective execution device), and made a deal with the Tox-men for a poison that could kill the Giant. The final confrontation included them trying to escape, but finding the giant blocking their way. They poisoned it and fled (losing one of the barbarian's dogs in the process), and encountered two more of the enemy adventurers, who held them in place with some powerful magic, while they raised the giant from the dead to finish them off.

Unfortunately for The Crows, a Hold Portal spell ended up choking the undead giant to death, and after some interesting interactions with lamp oil, a doll that protects against mind-control, a magic throne, and a magic crown, the players came out on top, and fled the observatory with their loot, turning what information they discovered over to Blister.

One member of the enemy party escaped, with a book of considerable and eldrich power. She will use this to rule the area. Blister took control of the observatory. In some years, there will be war.

Observations

Some things I learned from running this OSR style of game is that our group is more generally used to things happening to them. I often found that I had to prompt for a decision on what to do next, which I did adapt to, but considering the run of fairly narrative-style games we've done recently (Trigger Happy, Cthulhutech), this should not have been surprising.

The players in our group can think around corners pretty well when they're paying enough attention. Sometimes we all don't pay attention. I'll try harder to be interesting all the time.

Running modules is a lot of work. Admittedly, DCO seems more complicated than most, but when I'm running my own stuff, a short collection of notes to jog things in my own brain is just fine. When I'm working with something intricate someone else wrote, I have to do homework.

This took longer than I was expecting. Probably due to my relative inexperience with modules, but I way underestimated how long it would take.

Some things I'm going to steal for future games:

The opening event-crawl. An absolutely fantastic way to set the tone, and instantly invest players.

Item cards. Why haven't I used these before? I love them.

My LotFP hacks. These actually worked pretty damn well. I was worried, but aside from some XP adjusts, I think they were fine.

Dungeons that don't give a fuck about you.

Autonomous intelligent enemies with a goal and a plan to achieve it. The Crows doing things that affected the party and scenario, as well as a timeline of what they do if no one stops them. I do this already when I run mysteries, but the methods involving ruthlessness and a lack of direct confrontation were an interesting twist.

More Challenge-based shit. While I like the more story-based games as well, games about overcoming obstacles have a draw for me as well. And there's a lot of fun weird challenges in this module.

I just finished all three of the Dark Souls 2 DLC's. That would be, Crown of the Iron King, Crown of the Sunken King, and Crown of the Ivory King. There are some high points in all three, some super low points, but over all, each one exemplifies the problems

I just finished all three of the Dark Souls 2 DLC's. That would be, Crown of the Iron King, Crown of the Sunken King, and Crown of the Ivory King. There are some high points in all three, some super low points, but over all, each one exemplifies the problems prominent in the base game in a condensed form. Namely, that the game was made by people who liked Dark Souls (DaS from hereon out), but didn't really understand what was so good about it.

With the development team of the original Dark Souls working on Bloodborne, some other people stepped up to fill the demand for a sequal to the iconic game. They turned out a product with some high points, a large number of perplexing design choices, and weak, by-the-numbers design, that ultimately fell short of the former glory of its predecessor.

To explain the biggest and most consistent problem, I'd like to pose a question: What is the one word that most people, even those that haven't played the game, would use to describe Dark Souls? My guess is that you, and most other people, would say "hard." DaS is known for being difficult. In an age of casual (not a deragatory term) games, difficulty sliders, and hand-holding tutorials, DaS proved that there is still a place for games that offer a consistent challenge. DaS does not have any difficulty levels. It's the same amount of hard for everyone. I myself used the words "Hard, but fair," to illustrate that although the game is difficult by modern standards, it is quite learnable, and stays away from the cheap, randomized instagibs that are sometimes associated with difficulty.

DaS2's biggest problem is that it's designers didn't understand that people loved the gameplay of DaS not because it was hard, but because it was a learnable challenge that was satisfying to overcome. Each time you cleared an area, you did so by your own wit, skill, and maybe a little luck. Through many deaths, you had learned the tactics and approaches necessary to claw past the obstacles in your way, and damn, did that feel good. But that's not the same as liking something because it is hard. Hell, E.T. for the Atari 2600 was hard, but it was hard because its game design was frustratingly bad. Sure, it's legendary for that, but that's not a goal to strive for.

Here's an example. Probably the most infamous boss fight in DaS is Orenstien and Smough (Fatty and Slim, Biggie Smalls, Snorlax and Pikachu, Laurel and Hardy, their nicknames are many). This is one of two times that you are pitted against two enemies in a boss fight (the first being the belfrey gargoyles, in which a second enemy with the same moveset you've already learned is introduced midway through the fight). The Super Londo Brothers are so difficult because they demand that you split your attention from the outset of the fight, and learn two very different movesets at the same time (until you down one, and must face the super-powered remaining enemy).

The third boss in DaS2 pits you against three enemies. There are in fact many multi-boss encounters in DaS2, often forcing veteran solo players to summon help just to pass the section. Some bosses come with swarms of enemies that pop up at intervals during the fight, evoking the feeling of "Adds" from MMORPG's. Because more is harder, and harder is better. Isn't it?

Furthermore, in DaS2 the consequences for death are strangely more severe (until you get multiple rings of life protection, anyway). In DaS, your punnishment was loss of progress, and potentially the loss of your accumulated souls, if you couldn't make it back to your bloodstain before dying again. DaS2 makes the perplexing decision of reducing your maximum health each each time you die, down to a maximum of half of your total life. This means that after each death, the area that killed you is more difficult, because you face it with less health. Because harder is better!(?) Furthermore, the more hollow you go (the more times you die and lose max health), the more likely you are to be invaded!(?) Because reasons? The only way to restore your max health is to use a Human Effigy (a limited item) to reverse hollowing. But you only have so many! And you can't farm them off enemies that have a chance to drop them because (here comes the dumbest thing ever, that's necessity of inclusion really should have been an indication that something was fundementally wrong with the gameplay loop)(Also, this needs bolds and italics) after being killed 12 times, enemies no longer respawn upon bonfire use.

DaS demanded that you learn to master the entire area between bonfires. DaS2 admits that for some areas, maybe you just want to make enough trips back and forth to empty the level forever. You no longer learn to overcome the challenge, you just beat it by attrition. Hit your face against a problem enough times, and you'll never have to learn to really deal with it. The fact that this was ever an option truly illustrates how much the people who made DaS2 didn't understand what was so wonderful about DaS.

DaS2 is a sequel. It's so much of a sequel that it hurts me. It has to be bigger, it has to be better, it has to me more over the top, it has to be harder, it has to include references to the original, everything is more, more, more! Two rings becomes four. Five item slots becomes ten. Greatswords beget Ultra Greatswords. More areas, more bosses, more enemies!

DaS2 is so preoccupied with topping and paying homage to it's predecessor (Look at Orenstien guys! Remember him? He's in this game too! We couldn't explain why if our lives depended on it!), that it can't be bothered with being its own great addition to the series. It feels like a fanfic game, trying to include all the things that video games have (lava level, poision level, boss castle, etc) but not really understanding or trying to make a cohesive whole out of them. Just stick it all in somewhere and hope. The truth is, the compact and intimate world design in DaS felt deeper than the tacked together disparate levels of the sequel. Bigger is not always better.

Sorry. So, the DLC's. If I could use one phrase to describe all three it would be "Swarms of powerful armored humanoids."

The DaS combat system thrives in encounters against a single powerful enemy, or 2-3 moderately powerful enemies, or 3-5 weak enemies. You are rewarded for a slow, careful approach to areas, dealing with enemies a few at a time in positions advantageous to you, not carving through swaths of enemies (as in spectacle fighters like Devil May Cry). You keep your shield up, and look for openings. You time your use of healing items carefully, as there is no pause button to save you.

DaS2, and its DLC to a far, far greater extent, thinks that sending 3-5 powerful enemies at you at a time makes for a compelling increase in difficulty. They swarm you with enemies that will hammer your shield into submission, or just guard-break you without bothering to deplete your stamina bar. They surround you and box you in, foiling your attempts to create distance to make the encounter managable. They punish you mercilessly for thinking you could make use of a weapon with fast attacks, but little poise damage.

The optimal way to clear the DLC's is to sprint by enemies without fighting them whenever you can, because you are not rewarded enough for fighting them. In situations where they box you in, the best "strategy" is to take the largest, heaviest weapon you can carry, capable of making sweeping attacks that can hit and stagger multiple opponents, and swing wildly until everything dies, simply accepting that you'll take some hits, then heal up and do it again. It's not the intelligent, slow, plodding pace of the original; it's a brawl. I find that I got no satisfaction from beating a boss, no sense of accomplishment, just a checkbox.

There came a time when the game was simply not fun to play, and this probably disappoints me more than anything else. The reason I love DaS so much (on top of all the other reasons) is that the gameplay is so precisely refined that it is nothing but a mechanical pleasure to play. I go back to the game time after time because long after I have seen everything the game has to show me, it's still pure joy to simply play it.

But long enough into playing DaS2, I just wanted to be done with it.

]]>

Prince of Thorns by Mark Lawrence is almost something I loved. I made it all the way through, and it more than kept me amused on my flights and waits in and out of Denver. Ultimately, however, it came across as a talented author pursuing a gimick first, and a

Prince of Thorns by Mark Lawrence is almost something I loved. I made it all the way through, and it more than kept me amused on my flights and waits in and out of Denver. Ultimately, however, it came across as a talented author pursuing a gimick first, and a story second. Or something like that. I'll try and clarify. Minor spoilers ahead.

Prince of Thorns is set in a Post-apocalyptic version of Europe, in which humanity has returned to a medieval dark fantasy setting. This is a very good start as far as I'm concerned; my love of things post-apocalyptic, and my love for dark and low fantasy, are both well established (See Fallout, The Black Company, and more). The kingdoms are engaged in a long-running war with constantly-shifting alliances, and after over 100 years, no Emperor.

Our "Protagonist" is Jorg Ancrath, Prince, but leading a band of outlaws. Little more than 14 years old as the book begins, Jorg is on his way home, after several years on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge. He and his band of outlaws defy kings and armies, conquer nations, and fight against sinister sorcerors and ancient technological ghosts.

This sounds like the sort of thing I'd be all over. And in a way, it was. Lawrence is a fantastic writer, and kept me turning pages all the way through. The problem was, while I enjoyed the story and the writing, I hated every character.

This is a major problem. Part of reading is inserting ones self into the story, through a protagonist with whom one can identify, and I found it impossible to identify with so vile a protagonist. I don't demand that everyone be a saint, but a redeeming factor, a touch of humanity, is important to making a character sympathetic and believeable.

Jorg, however, comes off as a teenager's first self-insert character, created imediately after he has learned about the word "anti-hero." Mean and brooding, with no regard for human life, even that of his comrades, Jorg is a military genius with a tragic past, who leads a band of equally vile men, who rape and murder for fun. In spite of this, he is of noble birth, and inspires fear in the hearts of courtiers, commands the loyalty of good men, and everything seems to work out for him, regardless of how reckless, callous, and thoughtless his decisions are.

This could not be more frustrating for me. The setting is something I am all about. The writing is incredibly well executed, and I kept turning pages out of a desire to learn what happened next. But, and this is important, the protagonist could have died, and I would not have minded. I would have even been happy about it. And this is a problem for me.

I had no one to root for, and therefore, no emotional investment. I had an intellectual investment in the continuing series of events, but no emotional attachment to a character.

[ACTUAL SPOILERS] And then we get to the idea of mind control. It's yet another thing that stops a character from being relatable. Over a short period of time, this can work. If we observe a character behaving different from how they have been established, then we know something is wrong, and when mind control is revealed, we understand, and furthermore, we feel the violation, as someone is forced into doing things they don't want to do. But when mind control is revealed after a longer period of time, it does not have the same effect, especially if we have never gotten to know the real character. If their actions don't truly represent the content of their character, and never have, then what is the point? How are we to be invested in such a fascimile of a person?[/ACTUAL SPOILERS]

All in all, I'd really like it if Lawrence would apply his obvious skill to a better set of characters. I do not think I will be continuing this series, but I may look into something else that Lawrence has written, in the hope that somewhere there is a sympathetic character.

But hey, you might like it. You could certainly do worse.

]]>

This is a rewrite of a short that I wrote a while ago. It's not perfect, but I do like this draft better.

It was Take Your Child To Work Day, and Ellie thought her dad had the coolest job there was. They took the elevator up that morning. Initially,

This is a rewrite of a short that I wrote a while ago. It's not perfect, but I do like this draft better.

It was Take Your Child To Work Day, and Ellie thought her dad had the coolest job there was. They took the elevator up that morning. Initially, she was terrified because she was afraid of heights, but a few seconds after liftoff, curiosity overcame her, and she spent the entire rest of the ride with her face pressed against the window, watching the ground fall away beneath her, blurring into a patchwork of greens and browns and blues. Somehow, when she was high enough up to see the curvature of the earth, distance no longer held the same meaning or provoked the same fear. She squeezed her father’s hand, and could only manage to exclaim “Wow!”

Her father smiled, and pointed out a cluster of big lakes, a rainstorm over mountains, and massive sheets of white ice. Ellie had seen pictures and projections before, but the sheer scale of it was awesome. She hugged her father’s arm and stared out the window as the blue sky gave way to a light gray, and finally to the starry blackness of space. The world looked big and small, both at the same time.

When the elevator settled into its cradle, and the view was blocked by the inside of the dock, Ellie finally peeled herself off of the window. “Dad, do you do this every day?” Ellie asked, while they stood, waiting to exit.

“Not every day, Ellie. Sometimes there’s things that need doing on the ground,” her father said, smiling. “But I try to make the trip once a week at least. There’s nothing like it, is there?”

Ellie shook her head no, her eyes wide.

Once off the elevator, they boarded a pod, and took the Ring to the wrecking platform. The trip took twenty minutes, but without any windows, Ellie thought it was a lot longer. Her father assured her they were going thousands of kilometers, and to be patient. Just as Ellie was sure they must have gone all the way around the world, the pod slid to a halt. The harness retracted automatically, and Ellie squealed with fear and delight at her weightlessness, as she began to float off her seat.

Ellie’s father grinned, caught her, wrapped an arm around her waist, and, with a quick extending of his knees, arrowed them both down the corridor. They bounced and spun down the cylindrical hallways, and Ellie screamed and laughed, as she lost all sense of up and down. The people they passed flattened themselves, chuckling, against the sides of the tubes to avoid collisions.

They finally stopped at one of the hatches off of the corridor which opened onto a small room with a domed window. A single chair occupied the center of the room, facing towards the domed glass and the Earth below. Between the Ring and the Earth was a hulking gray and black blocky shape, buzzing with the activity of smaller shapes.

Ellie’s father settled down on the room’s seat, and set Ellie on his lap, lightly strapping the both of them in. The emitters sprang to life, flickering in a brief panic as they tried to project to two different viewpoints in a single chair. After a few seconds, they brought the images into focus on both sets of eyes. Ellie stared at the overlay, the jumble of lines, numbers, and designations complete gibberish to her.

“What is all that out there, Dad?” Ellie asked, pointing at the chunk of metal out in orbit.

“That’s what we’re taking apart today, Ellie,” her father said, his fingers dancing across the keypads on the armrests. “Here, let me bring it a bit closer.”

The projectors showed a zoomed image in the center of Ellie’s vision. It was old, full of right angles, and incredibly discolored from what seemed like ages of wear and tear. Hundreds of smaller crafts buzzed around it, but the massive vessel itself was silent and lifeless.

“How big is it? And how far away?” Ellie wondered.

“It’s about 5 kilometers long, and about as far away. It’s mass, minus crew and cargo, is about Fifty Million metric tons.” Ellie’s father started to bring up views of the ship from different angles. It hung in orbit, inert, silent, imposing. “It’s one of the old terraformers. Do you know what they were for?”

“My teacher said they were for fixing the planet,” Ellie said, quietly, taking it all in.

“Partly,” her father said. “Before that, they were for other planets. It takes some very specific conditions for a planet to be considered habitable. These ships were for turning those lifeless rocks into the sort of place we can live.”

“So then why are we breaking it?” Ellie asked, twisting around to look at her father.

Her father smiled. “Because it’s old, Ellie. We can make better ones now, and we can use parts of this old one to make them.”

"Oh." Ellie stared out at the old ship in silence for a minute. "What was its name? Don’t ships have names?"

"You know, I don’t know. Let’s ask!" Her father pushed a button. "Hey Mitch! My little girl wants to know what the name of this former is."

A sharp, bearded face popped up on a new projection. “You’re on the salvage job, right? The Gore. The N.S.S. Gore. Hey there, Ellie!”

“Hi Mister Rother! Why is it called that?” Ellie’s father rolled his eyes. Kids always had more questions.

“I don’t know, hon,” shrugged Mitch. “Maybe you can look that up later.”

"Aww, homework?" Ellie moaned.

Mitch chuckled. “Nah, Ellie, it counts as fun if nobody makes you do it,” he said with a wink.

The room was quiet for a few minutes. Ellie watched her father as he remotely positioned the drones, lining up the first cut. Finally, when he was satisfied with the angle, he poked his daughter in the ribs, causing her to squeal “Daddy!” and giggle.

“Want to do the honors, hon?” He indicated a flashing button on the chair’s right armrest.

“Honors?” Ellie asked, slumping in the chair and pushing her head backwards against her father’s chest until she could see his upside-down face.

“Do you want to make the first cut?” he asked, blowing Ellie’s weightless blonde hair out of his face.

Ellie looked back at the distant terraformer. “There’s no one on it, right?” she asked, her voice marking her excitement.

Ellie grinned and pressed the button. A white-hot glow emitted from the old ship, as one of the drones began to make the first incision, carving off a slice of the bulkhead. A burst of debris particles leaked from the wound, and the collector drones swooped in to scoop them up. As the drone completed the cut, the segment of the terraformer’s hull was loaded into a waiting transport.

“Cool!” Ellie exclaimed, staring at the projections, which now overlayed a grid of planned cuts.

“I guess it is, Ellie,” her father grinned and tussled her hair. “Alright, let’s say goodbye and thank you to the S.S. Gore, while we can still recognize it.”

They did.

As her father made more incisions, Ellie asked, “Why’d we thank it? It doesn’t have an AI or anything, does it?”

“No, but we owe it a lot,” her father explained. “That ship and others like it were finally able to repair some things that people ruined many many years ago, before we could even really come up here. You know how your mom says you should leave things in better shape than you found them?”

Ellie nodded.

“Well, Ellie, we finally did. It took us a long time, but we finally did.”